Peter Weiss' The Aesthetics of Resistance

‘When things are beyond rational comprehension…that’s the very time we must apply our reason. It’s our only weapon’. —Trotsky in Exile

The Pergamon Altar is the occasion for the unnamed narrator of The Aesthetics of Resistance (1981) — a cipher for the novel’s author were his origins self-consciously proletarian rather than bourgeois — to reflect, along with his comrades in an underground anti-fascist movement, on the contradictions between the ruling class and a caste of technocrats cultivated and secured relative to a then-emerging social order of domination based on private property. At issue is how a working-class intelligentsia in the present should relate to cultural forms clearly marked by aristocratic ideals. The altar is a work of military triumphalism, built in order to consolidate Eumenes II’s monarchical authority and also exerted an influence over Nazi architecture. The comparison is striking and indicative of the ways in which Weiss’ understanding of capitalism is essentially Banajian. Passages which describe the rise of capitalism emphasise the role of merchants, seafarers and colonists. There is more continuity than differentiation between different forms of oppression legible in the works of European art across which the novel moves, whether feudal, capitalist, financial, imperial or state.

One response posits an analogy between culture and surplus derived from the exploitation of labour; it is precisely because these works are alien to the consciousness of the oppressed that they are their rightful inheritors. There is therefore no concession to a kind of reductionism which often shaped Soviet debates on cultural policy. The influence of Lukács in a critique of Kakfa for his representation of capitalist degeneracy in irrational terms is manifest, but this develops, on reflection, into a reading of The Castle (1926) as speaking directly to the timidity and disorientation of the German working class. The tradition of Mitteleuropean realism that Lukács celebrates is elsewhere critiqued as a legitimation of bourgeois ownership. It is therefore a critical Marxism, consonant with the methods of the late Frederic Jameson, that is advanced here, one which locates within artworks the promise of a future collective realisation. Weiss is perhaps more willing to draw battle-lines; Dadaism and surrealism’s aesthetics of transgression are inadequate if their critique does not bring one to a central contradiction.

At work in the set of themes which consistently emerge across the extended considerations of European art which characterise the novel — consciousness, leadership, worker education — is a critical interrogation of the German road to socialism. The melancholia attendant on the insufficiency of the existing leadership (Lenin’s failures in leaving the Soviet state apparatus in the hands of relatively mediocre lieutenants, the figures of Hercules, Engelbrekt Engelbrektsson) speaks to a revolutionary impulse that never recovered from the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht. These are difficulties which Luxemburg herself diagnosed, both at the founding of the KPD and in her more general scepticism about the viability of Leninist organisational methods applied to the German context, where the organised working class was more accustomed to an open and democratic culture.

This is not to say that Weiss is a partisan for spontaneity. Within Luxemburg’s critique is a lack of necessary scepticism regarding the classed nature of these putatively democratic institutions, a perspective that the narrator’s father introduces in a psychogeographic account of Berlin’s geography during the revolution. Its private medical clinics, structures of local government left untouched by the workers’ councils, are reminders of the SPD’s failure to conquer and reshape German society. Regardless of the outcome of the armed confrontations of 1918 - 19, the power of the junkers is everywhere latent and offers fertile terrain for conciliation, co-option and compromise.

Significant amounts of material speak to the SPD’s neglect and repression of cultural initiatives which may have consolidated any revolutionary cadres threatening the social bases of revisionism. This is a diagnosis that Weiss derives from Liebknecht, whose speeches in the Reichstag explained how the ruling class shapes mass opinion through its control over the system of education and mass media, furthering imperial aggression in a manner that ultimately proved fatal to the cause of socialism in Europe. However there is no alignment with any particular viewpoint or tendency here. Rather than the Soviet bureaucracy, the Sparticists or an envisioned more combative rank-and-file, the vehicle for future transformation is a critical Marxism which makes no concessions to orthodoxy or anti-fascist alliances when they come at the expense of a revolutionary horizon.

Of the two historical figures who are granted the most space in the novel, the more obscure is Willi Münzenberg, a working-class autodidact active within the SPD’s youth organisations in developing a self-conscious working class culture via film screenings, poetry, short story collections and plays staged in worker theatres. Regarded as a key figure in an anarcho-syndicalist tendency by the social democratic leadership, and utilised by Liebknecht to rally opposition to reformism at congresses, Münzenberg was seen as a corrupting influence, particularly when the youth sections established contact with Luxemburg after she had fallen out of favour with the party hierarchy for her position on militarism. This dynamic was to repeat itself after the war; Zinoviev undermined Münzenberg’s work within the youth international due to his resistance to Soviet monopoly over the Comintern.

Weiss’ style also owes much to Münzenberg, who writes in an analytical but intensely concentrated tone of the concrete hardships suffered by the working classes of Austria, America, England, Germany, Japan, Norway and Switzerland, oppressed by unemployment and the cost of living, the remoteness of any revolutionary prospects, the machinations of capitalist governments and the cynicism of social democratic leaders hostile to the Soviets. In propaganda produced for Workers International Relief, we see the movement of food transports funded by the Brazilian, Canadian and Mexican workers whether in or outside trade unions or the network of Soviet aid organisations, and forcing their anti-Communist governments in the direction of diplomatic recognition. Münzenberg moves fluidly between the historical processes these predicates animate, the enormity of which is suggested both in the use of statistics but also the capacity of individual moments of self-sacrifice — prisoners surrendering pay, workers selling wedding rings, giving up smoking or skipping meals — to accrete in the collective agency necessary to develop farms in Kazan, fisheries in the lower Volga, by making up shortfalls of equipment, to secure a bulwark of proletarian strength ravaged by famine in the context of the global struggle of labour against capital in a panoramic, coruscating idiom of run-on sentences sustained by climax, auxesis, the occasional colloquialism and delicately-placed commas.

While a comprehensive account of Brecht’s methods would bring us beyond a situation of Aesthetics, in abbreviating his extensively theorised oeuvre and technical vocabulary — the very purpose of which was its mobility and adaptiveness — we can say that he aimed to demonstrate the mutability of one’s social position and grant a sense of a capacity to intervene. Behind this animus was theatre’s perceived dependence on artifice to invest the audience in a theatrical scenario and bring about a condition of satisfied equilibrium coeval with the unfolding of a plot, a numbing rather than an arousing function. Brecht associated this defect with the theatricality of fascism; Brecht may have noted how Hitler’s gestures were derived from Wagnerian opera, but he could not have known how extensively practiced they were in private.

Like Münzenberg, Brecht attracted criticism from other sections of the left, specifically party members inclined to a more literal view of what socialist theatre should be, such as a more overt transmission of images pertaining to class struggle or revolution; when staging Drums in the Night Brecht rejected Piscator’s suggestions to depict Noske’s troops. Brecht’s plays are as much an anarchic reaction against orthodox morality as they are an injunction. His characters are disillusioned outcasts, beggars, tramps, his subjects crime, rape, murder, prostitution, mob violence, his settings bars or outdoor wastegrounds, recalling more Bakunin’s bandits than the disciplined steelworkers of Petrograd or Berlin. Brecht was critical of the repressive mandates of Bolshevik cultural policy but any comments he made in this regard were above all rooted in an analysis of the state of siege to which the Soviet state was subject. He encouraged Lukács to avoid initiating any exchange of polemics, though we must be grateful that he was ignored.

Brecht’s compositional approach varied from Weimar to California and the DDR. While Weiss accurately depicts their collaborative nature — representing Brecht as a conduit for the research and debates undertaken by more directly involved activists in an improvised salon — and this corresponds with the novel’s positioning of culture as a means of getting at a synoptic vision of social structures, the verdict seems to be negative. One line in particular insinuates that Brecht is an exploiter, profiting from the work of others.

Both of these men were relative outliers in the Marxism of the thirties. If we control for the force of their circumstances, the spirit in which their cultural work was undertaken was such that they did not sit in any one place comfortably. The affective appeal they would have had to Weiss, whose radicalisation was shaped more by the high points of third-worldism, the cultural stagnation of the GDR, the ambivalent position of the Federal Republic relative to de-Nazification and the Judeocide is obvious. The relatively greater pull they command could represent an instance of stick-bending, the necessary corrective to the deadening weight of bureaucracy or indeed the facts of individual acts of artistic or organisational achievement.

The Aesthetics of Resistance shows us how a novel composed of layers of narrative, reports, discussions and the application of intellectual work can move beyond a discourse reified into mannerism and meta-textual gimmickry. The lack of any affect, how no event or statement breaks the condition of reflective equanimity might be a testament to its discipline, the perpetuation of an unvarnished register Weiss developed in documentary plays such as The Investigation or Discourse on Vietnam. It might also specify the condition of levelling that subsists as potential within capitalism, if only the intellectual, political work necessary to realise it could be accomplished. It is a novel about national and cultural exile, the struggle for asylum, work permits and the descent into a labour reserve army to be exploited beyond a national average. It reminds us that the politics of immigration have always been a fault line within socialist politics and one most in need of redress, given that a way of life built on a spirit of emancipatory critique within German culture — currently and once again in the process of disgracing itself (Meaney, ‘A Year in German Culture’) — has vanished and those fleeing repression provoke racial chauvinism at their destination rather than solidarity.